Lost Sight of Shore
by can-it-fly
Summary: Barnes falls, Zola escapes and Rogers lives. / Or: Barnes goes rogue, Zola is hog-tied and Rogers gets his best woman back. / (Note that this is a genderbend AU.)
1. Chapter 1

_This AU exists in a world where gender (and racial) equality came a bit sooner than in the real world. Obviously when your integration happens in the midst of a war, the atmosphere is going to be different than during peacetime._

 _In the past couple months I've fallen in love with female!Bucky Barnes, so this is the first of two (unrelated) fics starring her._

 _The story will be published every Monday night, and then I'm back to my big fic._

 _Warnings for: torture, graphic death and mental health issues._

 _(Depictions of graphic death.)_

* * *

They approached the base under the cover of a waxing half-moon. The clouds threatened rain and Dernier swore she'd seen red in the sunset, some old omen of blood spilled.

Steve told her to shut up before his words spread to the other GIs, but it wasn't like any of them would've cared. The only pens left serving hadn't had the chance to see action before Germany's surrender, or else lost everything back home and didn't care if they died in Europe.

The base was more of a fortress, really, or a castle updated for the 20th century. Peggy had called it a bunker but that wasn't right either – bunkers were built into the ground; this followed the mountain slope upwards, never more than a few levels high but damn near impregnable and easily hidden by the forest around them. Only the winding road and the guard stations along it hinted to its importance.

So this was where Zola had been hiding out since Schmidt's fall.

Steve motioned for his team – supplemented with a small company from the 3rd Infantry – they weren't letting Zola slip away to rebuild Hydra yet again – to approach and spread out. This was the size force he should've had command of during the war, given his rank of captain, but he was glad Colonel Phillips saw the wisdom in a large team instead of sixty pens.

Bucky had groused about that; captains and their sergeants should've gotten more than a measly five soldiers to command. No one would respect any of them. Steve asked, in private, if that meant they should ditch the Commandoes and move back into the army from the SSR. " 'Course not," Bucky answered, and that was that.

No one brought up those old complaints when Phillips, itching to catch Zola as much as any of them, gave Steve the company; doubly no one had pointed out that Dugan was also a sergeant.

The infantry pens spread out, surrounding the base under the tree cover. The Commandoes held back for the final check-in: confirming which platoons they'd take half the pens from – Dugan one, Dernier the second and Sawyer third – who'd watch Cap's six – "Monty," laughed Sawyer, "good luck keeping up." – and rendezvous points with the backup platoons in case things got ugly.

"They better not," Dugan grumbled. "We've been lookin' for this asshole for almost the whole damn year. Ever since Bucky –"

Dernier hacked a cough and Dugan fell silent.

 _Ever since Bucky died you've obsessed over Zola._

Steve resisted the urge to sigh, instead replying, "So we're not gonna screw it up this time around. Take position."

"Screw" and "up" were the magic words nowadays, reminders that they hadn't had one mission they felt good about since the one when Bucky died and Zola hadn't even been on the train to begin with.

In the aftermath of that disaster Peggy had plowed through their intelligence sources, triple-checking every informant the SSR used and every pen in their department until she found the mole. He'd confessed in an interrogation so beautiful Steve had to remind himself that Peggy was on their side, not Hydra's; ever since then Phillips handed more and more of the SSR's administration over to her.

She'd done such a thorough job cleansing their intelligence network, she confessed to Steve later, to distract herself while teams were out looking for the _Valkyrie_.

He returned to active duty within a week of thawing out; Peggy pursed her lips but didn't say anything, only handed him a folder with the next mission. It left the taste of ash in his mouth, retrieving documents from an abandoned safehouse. The one after that did too, until he started hating missions and active duty and being away from home, even though he couldn't remember how civilian life felt like.

The day he realized he needed to be discharged was the day Peggy slipped him a ring, an unspoken question, and he gave it back to her that night.

The one piece of foresight Steve had ever had, really, was asking her out on VE Day.

"Platoon one-A, report."

"In position," said Dugan.

"Platoon one-B, report."

"In position."

"Platoon two-A."

Dernier: "In position."

"Two-B."

"In position."

"Three-A."

"We found a guard post," Sawyer told him. "Empty."

"Platoon two-B reporting, just found one too. No hostiles spotted."

"Three-B?"

"In position. No activity."

"Hold positions."

Steve muted the walkie-talkie, took the earpiece out, sighed and rubbed his forehead. This was going the way every other mission the past few months had gone, except there were now sixty pens making the whole time awkward instead of only part of the time that the Commandoes on their own felt off-kilter.

He needed this to be over. He should've requested a discharge months ago, if he was being honest. He should've gone home and faced his best friend's family. But no, he was still in Europe, going over maps and schematics and invitation templates because dammit, if there was one thing he wasn't going to do it was half-ass his wedding.

The wedding was half-assed. He knew it, Peggy knew it, everyone on the damn base knew it. Her parents wouldn't be there, his parents were dead so it didn't matter, and he didn't know or like anyone back home who would come for Steve Rogers, only Captain America.

They hadn't even sent out the invitations yet.

They should've just eloped. Peggy had said it would be better but _noooo_ , Steve had to –

– footsteps behind him, crunching in the snow because it was fucking January and it was always cold in –

He spun, knife at the ready, and found Sawyer with the radio. "There's a message from Carter – Cap, you gotta take this."

Of course Sawyer knew he'd muted his comm even though he shouldn't have.

Steve radioed in his identification, got the right counter phrase from Carter and confirmed. Then,

"We recovered Morita."

They stared at each other, the three men crouched down in this godforsaken forest in The Middle of Nowhere, East Germany. "Repeat that?"

"We recovered Morita. Hydra captured him last month when he was on patrol. He's weak but alive. They were going to kill him yesterday but the executioner let him go."

"Why would they do that?"

"He doesn't know. The others with him were killed."

"What's his condition?"

"He'll live. I've sent one of my half-platoons to the coordinates he gave us."

"...How did he get coordinates?"

"The executioner gave him a compass. It's all rather confusing, he's not made much sense."

"Is the mission compromised?"

"No. Continue with caution."

Steve ended the transmission, handed the radio back and put his comm earpiece back in place. "Ready on my command."

He was ready for this night, ready for the war to finally be over. He was ready to go home and face the Barnes family. He needed to invite them to his wedding knowing full well they probably wouldn't show up because why would you when no one gave you answers for ten months?

He needed to take Zola down; it was the only sort of closure he would get from the fucking war. He was ready to marry Peggy – they'd danced around each other for far too long, and since they'd got together they couldn't have rushed through each of Stark's "mile markers" any faster.

His team all tiptoed around him in those weeks after Stark's people recovered him from the ice. He wrote and threw away dozens of letters to the Barnes family, beat fifteen heavy bags into oblivion and binged on mess food so that he could throw up in the bushes afterwards. Even in the field he took stupid risks just to hear his dead best friend's voice in his head, telling him so.

Peggy and Gabby finally broke the code of silence after a month. They knocked him unconscious in the middle of a Commandoes meeting and he came to tied by one hand to a hospital bed. Gabby told him to cry it out while Peggy negotiated with Doc X to keep the room available overnight.

It took him seventeen hours total, crying the whole time, and he walked out of the room clear-headed and starving.

 _If someone's seen you at your worst and stuck by you, that's love_ , his mom had told him once, _and you can be sure they'll stick around._

Bucky's whispers of _you're a fucking idiot, you're gonna get yourself killed_ shifted to _ask the woman out already!_ and he decided he didn't want that in his head anymore. Bury your dead, that kind of thing. And then VE Day came with the bouquet of flowers and went, along with his virginity, with Peggy sprawled out on top of him – and the blanket – on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel. Steve tried to move on.

This ended tonight. He would move on tonight, with this.

"Cap," said Sawyer over the comms. "We found a body. A guard."

"Same here," Dugan reported.

Platoon 3's lieutenant: "As with us."

The other platoon leaders called in their own dead Hydra pens and Falsworth found theirs soon after, her neck cut clean and deep.

In Kreischberg, the dead bodies of Zola's prisoner-experiments had been piled in a corner of the room where he'd found Bucky. Steve ignored those best he could, focusing instead on getting his best friend out of the restraints, but the deep red lines on their throats had seared into his memory in a way that the map of Hydra's bases never did.

Two weeks later Peggy taught everyone in his new team the best ways to silence enemy sentries with their necks: slashing carotid to carotid, or breaking it by twisting at an extreme angle.

Steve stuck to the neck-breaking; Peggy and Bucky both favored knives.

"Consolidate positions," he ordered. "No one on their own. Dernier, to me."

Dernier showed up shortly with a pen beside her. " _Que se passe-t-il?_ "

She didn't sound any more excited than Steve did to be there.

With Jones gone home Dernier was the only woman left in the Commandoes. She'd consolidated tents with Steve and Morita, a cramped atmosphere that only remedied itself when Jim disappeared doing recon on a base a month back. Now Steve wished he could size the tent down to make it feel less empty.

Two Commandoes MIA, presumed dead – well, only one anymore – and one more discharged. If the SSR wanted to keep Steve's team going after he shipped home then they'd need to recruit some more pens than just the one – not that Sawyer was any less of a soldier than his predecessors.

"The posts were empty. Someone killed every guard out there," he told her and Falsworth; they were the oldest on the team, veterans who'd served twice as long as Steve had, and he liked to get their assessments when the situation sent him mixed signals. "The backup teams recovered Morita. He said Hydra had him as a POW and gave him to someone to kill, but they let him go."

Dernier wrinkled her nose. "Do you think this person killed the guards? It sounds unlikely."

"Stranger things have happened," supplied Falsworth. "And we have no reason to believe our intel was unreliable."

Their intel had come from an "estranged associate" of Zola's, name of Jacobus. He'd been in the same science program with Erskine and was persecuted by the Nazis for supposed Jewish ancestry; unlike his colleague he had solidly Protestant stock, and somehow his experience going through the wringer made him _more_ anti-Semitic. But Zola had screwed him over one too many times to get to the top of Hydra and they'd found Jacobus drinking his shitty life away in a Vienna pub. It took ten minutes to flip him.

"It came from a Nazi. Of course it was unreliable."

Dernier was a French Jew; she'd deposited her husband and children under aliases in Switzerland before joining the Resistance. Obviously she took a dim view of using "reformed" Nazis for intelligence but the SSR wasn't above moral compromises.

"We have seventy pens," she continued. "Even if we assume the source lied about the size of the base, we will have the – _quelle est l'expression?_ "

"The element of surprise. Yes. I would advocate continuing the mission as well."

Someone screamed.

Not the childish sounds of terror that damsels in distress had used in the few years before talkies were affected by the Women's Revolution; this was a warning shout, short and loud, and came from inside the building.

Falsworth swore in English, Dernier French and Steve Irish Gaelic, and they clutched their guns. "Back to your platoon!"

Dernier and her pen ran off; the two men left behind ran forward. "Advance with caution," Steve ordered through the comms.

The hardest part would be when they crossed the open area, not quite big enough to be a field, between the woods and the base. The roof had crenellations, perfect points for snipers, though no one in their right mind would sit up there for days on end on the off chance that a crazy fake army captain would –

Steve shook Bucky's words from his brain, held his shield up and sprinted across the clearing.

Nothing.

Well, something: more shouts. Yelling – panic even, too muffled for him to make out words. It rose and fell, individual voices cutting off only for others to take their places.

Steve used a tree stump as a jump-off to the roof, tucked into a roll and jumped up levels to get to a door he'd seen from the ground. He passed more dead guards, three snipers and two guns. Finally the door, and he slammed against it at full speed with his shield.

It held.

"Captain!" shouted the second platoon's lieutenant, name of Kotani. "In position. Orders!"

"Move in!" he told her and ran himself against the door again. Again, it held.

Damn, they must've reinforced it from the inside.

Steve tried again, and again, until the thuds turned into bangs and –

No, that was a gun.

Someone was shooting.

"One-A, report."

"Shots fired from inside the building. I got not idea for entry unless we shoot up the whole door."

"One-B."

"Same."

"Two-A?"

All the same: shots, one every couple seconds, and no one could find a way into the fucking building.

Not an automatic, those were individual shots – all the same sound, same weapon and location, not a bullet wasted – who was shooting?

"Never waste bullets," Phillips told Dugan when he handed him the gun. "No crazy wahooing like you Texans love to do. You're a GI, not a cowboy."

Still, Dugan shot a bit too often at the sky after successful missions. He planned to be an explosives expert when he went home; he complained that they'd discontinued fireworks displays once the Depression hit, and then the war was on and he'd never got a chance to see those beautiful explosions.

Somehow he'd still stepped up to lead the Commandoes, sentencing himself to at least another year on the front once Peggy and Steve discharged.

"Never waste bullets," Phillips told Morita, and the private smirked and said, "If I'm shooting I'll be close enough to see the whites in their eyes."

Jim was alive and safe. The medics were probably force-feeding him ration bars and water. He would go back home, hug his mom and his three younger sisters and finally see his father's grave, in Fresno instead of that God-forsaken place in Idaho that Congress almost convinced Roosevelt to "ship all the Japs off to". He'd find a lady – or a fella, to be honest Steve suspected he'd be fine with either – and live his life.

Medical discharge. He could be home in two weeks.

Steve backed up and contemplated the door. He'd felt it give from the center, the weakest point instead of the top and bottom that he'd've expected for a locked door.

Someone had bolted the door twice-over – overkill for a regular night. Probably overkill for whatever was going on inside as well.

The shots sped up, almost as fast as a machine gun now but Steve knew the difference.

"Never waste bullets," Phillips told Jones, handing her two lightweight pistols not because she was a woman but so no Hydra pen would spot them where she'd hide them. "You're the team medic. If the situation needs you to shoot, you won't get a second shot."

Gabby always talked about her husband, how he was big and strong and liked his factory job so much he let her go to war instead. "Damn good thing he did, too," she'd say. "Back home I spent months trying to get into nursing school. Sign up with the army, hell they'll make me a doctor."

She'd taken the GI bill and was planning to go to medical school. Something about emergency rooms, she told them all in a letter, reminded her of the war in a good way. The adrenaline rush, probably. Steve heard her laughing through the pages as Monty had read the words aloud.

The resistance to Steve's next kick felt weird, as if the reinforcements inside had moved. On a hunch he slammed against the door at full-speed again and heard the wood whine against concrete.

Wedges.

"Shoot at the top and bottoms of the doors," he said into the talkie microphone, heading back down to the ground and Falsworth. "Stand by when you've cleared your entrance."

Six voices chorused "Yes, sir!"

Steve made short work of the door his partner had positioned himself next to and listened to the platoons report their own successes. At last 3A reported, "Entrance clear, Cap!"

"Move in!"


	2. Chapter 2

_I feel like at this point I should mention that this fic is focused on Bucky more than Peggy. I know the steggy community is pretty strong, and I definitely included a good number of scenes with Peggy in this fic; however this chapter and the next are Bucky-heavy and Peggy-sparse._

 _(Depictions of violent death, memory loss, torture and experimentation.)_

* * *

Falsworth tripped over the first body.

He cursed, let Steve help him up and nudged the corpse over on its back. His flashlight revealed the dead pen's neck slashed from carotid to carotid, his eyes open in shock and mouth shaped as if praying. Apparently he'd never got the chance to learn that God left the world alone in times of war.

The next two bodies were only yards ahead: one with her neck severed, the other's at an extreme angle common with breaks. Quick, quiet deaths all three of them.

"Platoon one-A, report."

"We've found least twenty dead," said Dugan through the comms.

Kotani added, "The same with us."

" _Oui_. The guards were killed with knives," Dernier contributed. "The regular pens, guns."

Five more soldiers dead on the ground, grouped as if they'd run towards their comrades on guard. Both the women had clean, centered shots in the back of their heads; neither Falsworth nor Steve spared the time to check the men.

"Two-B."

"We stopped counting at fifty-seven," their lieutenant reported; clearly they'd gotten farther into the building.

"Three-A."

Sawyer: "Same here, Cap. And with three-B."

"Okay. Rendezvous at the staging center." These were Nazis, after all – they were bound to have some kind of central rallying point. Usually it doubled as the mess hall.

This one tripled as a killing field, it seemed.

They saw the bodies as they approached: piled on top of each other, open eyes and mouths, perfectly-cut necks or clean-shot heads. They'd run away from the center, falling over the dead pens in front of them before dying themselves.

Falsworth took the front, Steve the rear, as they neared the end of the hallway. Two half-platoons had beaten –

"Only true believers join Hydra. They train them to act in one mind. Like ants."

He knew that voice.

Falsworth swung his rifle towards the words, swore again and dropped the gun.

When Steve had been fourteen, Bucky fifteen, they'd found Dodgers tickets on the street and gone to the game. It was intense, going to eleven innings, and for the rest of the week they'd been hoarse from yelling so much.

Her voice hadn't sounded a tenth as bad as it did now.

"If you leave even one alive they'll come for you. They won't stop. The ambush they set up with Jacobus would've given me two, three hours' head start but that wouldn't'a been enough. Nothing was ever enough."

Steve stepped out of the hallways, facing the same way as Falsworth, and caught sight of his best friend.

"They wanted a weapon. They got one."

Lights from his pens' guns flooded the room, not that Steve needed them. He took in first Dernier to his right, standing in front of her unit with her mouth halfway to the floor. Next the soldier still alive on the ground: only well-trained pens breathed that slowly with two bullets in their chest.

Steve's eyes followed the Hydra soldier's own, from the handgun pointed at her head and up the arm that held it – the metal arm. He could think about that later, though, because past the arm was the rest of Bucky.

The rest of Bucky...

"What took you so long?"

The calm in her voice – hell, how relaxed she stood – burned against the whip marks on her back, the blood dripping down some wound on her neck, her hair cut into a ragged bob.

More soldiers – Steve's pens, he needed to get his head back in the game – streamed into the hall. They halted at his hand and looked between their captain and the woman with the gun. "Sweep the rest of the building," he ordered, and when they hesitated he added, " _now_."

That left him, Falsworth, Bucky and the one pen still alive amid the sea of her newly-dead comrades.

Fun times.

Falsworth clicked on his flashlight and pointed it at Bucky; she didn't even flinch at the sudden light in her eye. Nothing seemed to bother her, it seemed – not the blood-soaked shirt that stuck to her back or the water falling onto her head from a leaky pipe. She just stood there, staring at the soldier on the ground.

"Bucky."

No reaction.

Steve inched forward, shield out in front, and stopped a good couple feet away from his best friend.

His dead best friend. Who wasn't dead at all.

Who'd killed all but one of the Hydra pens surrounding them.

"Buck," he repeated, and finally she took her eyes off the Hydra woman, resting them halfway towards Steve.

Closer now, Steve saw a hole in her cheek and red dots around her mouth. The hair at her temple was shorter than the rest, a neat little square as if it had been shaved off.

"What took you so long."

"I didn't know."

"Yes you did."

"No, Buck, I –"

"I _told_ you."

Yes, she had.

She'd told him by recovering so quickly from being strapped to Zola's table, going from stumbling to walking confidently through the halls of Kreischberg in less than a minute. She'd told him when she stopped wearing her far-sighted glasses and made shots no other sniper could, and with the cloth she bought to extend her pants sleeves every three months.

She told him with her request for double rations, never touching her drink unless it was 100-proof or stronger and bribing the mess with cigarettes for the leftovers. She told him when his hardest arm-wrestling win was against her, and when she took down the 6'3" asshole in the bar in a matter of seconds.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I should've listened."

She'd told him over and over again and he'd ignored it all.

Bucky switched the gun to her right hand and held it out towards Steve. He took it and told Falsworth, "Get the pen to a medic."

Once they were gone, Steve and Bucky alone, he asked her, "Where's Zola?"

 _Please tell me you killed him._

"There's a cabin. Couple miles southwest. He's there."

"Condition?"

She hesitated. "He might lose some limbs. I tied them tight."

"You said this was a trap."

"They thought it'd just be the team. The guards'd run, draw you deeper inside. Then every gun in here'd be aimed at you."

"And where were you supposed to be?"

"In the cabin. Waiting it out. Zola tried to – he took some prisoners and told me to take 'em into the woods and – and bury 'em but" – she shook her head – "I knew one of 'em."

 _That would be Morita._ "You let him go?"

She nodded.

"And the others?"

"I had to show proof," she murmured. "Pinkies. He said he could tell if they were left or right but –" A shrug. "He didn't. And I knew I could do this."

Peggy didn't mention anything about Bucky in her dispatch, which meant that Morita hadn't either, which meant that he didn't know she was the executioner.

Which meant that she'd been disguised in some way.

But if Zola had left her alone with someone she knew – he didn't think she'd recognize – what could he have _done_ that he was so confident –

Bucky swayed and Steve reached over to take her arm. She tensed, then slacked, and let him lead her away from the center of the room. "You should sit down."

"No." She shook her head. "I can't – it isn't –"

"What's gonna happen if you sit down?"

She paused, looking as if that was some novel thought that she'd never –

"Cap," said a pen from platoon 2, "we found something you need to see."

Steve rubbed Bucky's arm and sat her down on the bench. She leaned forward and stared at the ground, at nothing, and the tear in Steve's heart ripped itself a little bigger.

Falsworth, returned without the Hydra pen, sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. "I'll stay here. You should go."

 _Captains shouldn't prioritize one soldier over another._

"Get another medic. I'll be right back."

Platoon 2 had orders to secure the living quarters and any sort of scientific materials, and they'd expected to find at the most machine prototypes and small animal experiments. Now, Steve had no idea what he'd be handed to look at.

The pen escorted him down into a basement level and through the barracks, into a collection of bare concrete rooms. Lieutenant Kotani called him over to one that held a dentist's chair and what looked like a perm machine behind it, except it connected to some weird helmet instead of curling irons.

"What is that?"

Kotani handed him a packet of papers in reply.

Right – Zola was a scientist, the type that wrote everything down. Stark had a month-long field day with the inventions they'd recovered from Schmidt's headquarters.

He flipped the cover page over and came face-to-face with Bucky stretched out on an operating table, her left arm cut off halfway up the forearm. Someone had stuffed cloth in her mouth and turned her head to the side but her open eyes burned at the camera.

A few more pages later he found the next photo, Bucky shackled against a wall by her throat and arms, baring her teeth at the photographer. The metal that held her left, prosthetic arm strained, looking near to breaking.

Bucky on the operating table again, tubes running into her human arm and wrist.

Bucky with her face shoved into a wall, bare back flogged and bleeding for the camera.

Bucky strapped into the dentist's chair, a bit in her mouth and electricity sparking around her head from the helmet.

More and more, proof of torture and experiments and later on a fighting ring: Bucky had her opponent on the ground, a gun aimed at his head. It was a near-identical image to what Steve had found in the staging center.

Hydra had wanted a weapon, all right.

The last two photos were full-length side profiles, one clothed and one in shorts and that flimsy shirt she wore in the other pictures. In the latter a tube poked out of her temple, with wires curled around it, and some kind of metal – a muzzle? – covered her mouth and fastened at the back of her neck.

A rod with hinges traveled down her spine, and her hands were clamped behind her back. Her shirt was barely one at all, only covering her chest, kept together by two tight strings running around her neck and waist. The only scrap of modesty was a binder, just a band, that flattened her chest.

She'd always complained about her bust getting in the way of her uniform; Peggy and Jones did too, until Phillip's secretary discovered a French refugee who made chest binders out of elastic and cotton. Binders and menstrual cups were now distributed to every female active combatant; the males got protective cups and a pamphlet on gender equality.

The other photo featured Bucky standing in the same position but with free hands. She was covered shoulder to toe in black, even her left arm, and goggles supplemented the muzzle. The temple that Steve could see had been sewn back together and fuzz already covered her skin.

Steve let Lieutenant Kotani push him down into a chair; he didn't think his legs would hold out much longer anyway. She closed the file and took it out of his hands. He heard her order her soldiers to secure the machines in the other rooms – there were other rooms? more things they used to torture his best –

"Cap."

He looked up from his hands and moved to stand. "Sorry."

Kotani shook her head and pushed him gently back down into the chair. "My first three pens who looked through it, they're still throwing up in a piss pot couple rooms over. You and her are close, right?"

"Best friends."

She grimaced. "I got a pen knows German. He managed to skim through the files, found something you should know. That thing there" – she pointed at the chair – "Zola invented to erase memories."

 _– don't think about it keep your head in the game don't think about the photo –_

"Did your pen find Zola's notes about it?"

"He read through them. She started cooperating, pretended Zola broke her but he caught onto it. He called it a race to the bottom. He finally thought he'd gotten rid of any memories that'd make her doubt allegiance to Hydra, but obviously he was wrong," she added. "My pen said it wasn't as bad as what he'd seen liberating Auschwitz. But they'd had more people to experiment on."

 _Think forward, not backwards._

"All right. Secure the northwest perimeter and prepare everything for extract in a couple hours."

"Yes, sir."

Steve made the rounds to the other two platoons, pulling his Commandoes aside privately to give them a short summary of what had happened: "She pretended to collaborate so they'd let their guards down. Her head's not in the best place right now. I'm taking her back to base. Oh, and they had Morita but she helped him escape. Carter has him now."

To Sawyer, their new communications officer, he added, "Radio Carter for extraction. I want the patrol units on alert. Hydra could have backup in the area."

He talked to Dugan last, giving him command once extraction arrived. "Well," the sergeant commented, "at least now you've got your best woman. God knows Frenchie won't do all of our weddings."

The words hit Steve like cold water, shattering his reality, finally, that night: his best friend was alive.

His best friend would be at his wedding, which he kept obstinately arranging despite the fact that Peggy's family wouldn't accept a Catholic ceremony and Steve's list of people consisted of the Commandoes and his parish priest. Bucky would stand at the altar wearing a dress with her mother's embroidery and vouch that _this man will be hardworking and fair and loving_ , and she'd get on like a house on fire with Peggy's brother who'd agreed to be the bride's man and –

"Well you live closer to Gabby, I think she'd take that honor," replied Steve. He clapped Dugan on the shoulder and walked back to the staging center.

They'd have to push the date back. It was in a month's time, close in fact to Bucky's birthday, and she would likely need more time than that to readjust to civilian life. Peggy would role her eyes and remark that they'd picked February to _avoid_ New York City during wedding season, but Steve knew she loved flowers and hated snow more than she let on.

Now he had a legitimate excuse to delay sending the invitations. "Better late than never" seemed to be his and Peggy's motto but at least this, as with everything else, wouldn't be last-minute.

Steve waved Falsworth towards him as he approached the bench, and they talked quietly about extractions and chain of command and had Steve sent someone to retrieve Zola? No? Okay, Monty should take a half-platoon and go do that.

Alone with Bucky except for the medic, Steve knelt down in front of her – it was the same as she'd done when he was upset, or one of her sibs needed calming – and touched the red spots around her mouth.

"Who got it off?"

"I did."

"And this?" He moved his hand to run it down her spine.

"Yeah."

"How?"

"It – it was..."

Bucky looked down at her hands: the one flesh, covered in blood and little cuts; the other metal, blood crusting over the plates already. She took a long breath and the words rushed out: "The back was harder. I had mirrors but some places I couldn't reach so I pulled the ends out and ran a knife up, cut the electrodes off 'cuz I couldn't detach 'em from the nerves. The neck was easier, but" – she closed her eyes, swayed – "I dunno how much blood I lost. He cut in deep to put it in."

"Put what in?" asked the medic, still bandaging Bucky's neck with a rag.

"The – it controlled – what –"

"What controlled the electrodes," Steve finished, and Bucky nodded.

"You havta – they wouldn't – they hit the button if you fight back so the only way to get it off is to make 'em think you broke, then they'll leave you alone more and you can –"

She rubbed her hands on her legs.

 _You can kill them all._

Steve waved the medic away; he wouldn't do any good making Bucky nervous, and besides he was only standing around now. "How's your head?"

"I don't know."

"You know your name?"

The glare he got was enough of an answer, but she told him anyway, "Marjorie Barnes."

"Is that all?"

"I – I know there's a middle name. I know it's Bucky it, 'cuz Dad wanted a boy to name after Pennsylvania's only president, that's where he's from, but... I dunno which president that is."

Steve wanted to ask – _Is that what it feels like, losing your memory?_ – but Bucky as always read his mind: "Random details keep popping up, but the big things – they're just missing."

"Little things don't matter at all without the context?"

"Yeah."

He nodded. "Buchanan. Your dad named you after our country's worst president. Your mom took naming privileges away from him after that."

That got him a smile, or at least something closer to a straight mouth than a frown.

Steve pushed himself up and sat next to his best friend on the bench. He put his arm around her, pulled her in to lean against him – she did, after a second of stiffness – and rubbed her arm. Her left arm – the one that he shouldn't touch because it was Zola's, Hydra's, but it looked like Bucky had made it her own. "Can you feel that?" he whispered into her hair.

She nodded and relaxed against his chest.


	3. Chapter 3

_I am liable to forget to post this tomorrow, so have an early chapter._

 _(Depictions of experimentation and memory loss.)_

* * *

Bucky threw up three times on the flight back to London.

The first was just stomach bile and Steve covered her cheeks as she clutched the plastic bag. The second time was the barely-digested remains of what she had just put down her throat. A medic who'd jumped onboard with them decreed no more food until they were in a real infirmary.

The third...

Steve forced himself to stand still while he debriefed with Colonel Phillips, who was by now far past retirement age and didn't even blink at the report of two hundred Hydra soldiers dead at the hands of an MIA army sergeant, who herself careened between lethal glares and vomit-inducing panic attacks. Finally Phillips waved him away and Steve ran over to the infirmary.

There were people at the infirmary. Too many people – a crowd, even, pushing up against each other in the hallway. Doc X's secretary on duty grabbed Steve as he approached and told him, "They're all here to see your sergeant. I can't get them to leave."

"I'll take care of it," he told her, and grabbed the closest onlooker – not that there was anything to see, they were too far away – by the collar. "Report to command."

"Cap! We're due to be shipped back home Thursday, we just want to –"

He gave the pen another shake and told her, "That's an order."

Steve let go, the soldier trudged away and he repeated the process until his side of the hallway was empty; anyone gathered on the other side of one room's door – he assumed Bucky was beyond it – got the message and cleared out.

Inside it was calmer, just a few orderlies and nurses standing around to help Doc, and Bucky curled up on the bed with Peggy sitting beside her.

"Good, you're here," said Doc. "Sarge won't let me touch her."

Steve sighed and sat down opposite his girlfriend on the bed. "Buck? You gotta sit up. They have to look at your back."

Bucky shook her head and pressed further into the pillow.

"She hasn't slept in days," Peggy told Steve. "I looked over some of the notes." Because of course she knew German; she understood every language they'd come up against so far. "They were injecting her with amphetamines, among other things."

"When's the last time she ate?" asked Doc X.

"She tried some ration bars and water on the plane," Steve told her. "They didn't stay down. She started throwing up blood right after."

"And before that?"

He looked down at Bucky, still curled up with her knees touching her chin, and she shook her head again.

"When was the last time you remember eating?" Doc asked her directly.

She closed her eyes. "How long's it been?"

Steve: "Ten months."

"There you go."

Doc stared. "How did – IVs, must've been."

A nod.

"All right. Mette, prep an IV. We'll do PPN until we can get her stomach sorted out."

"Yes, Doctor Ximenez."

Doc X leaned back in her chair and told Steve, "I would let her sleep except it looks like she heals as fast as you do. There are wires in her spine that have to come out, and that's before I even look at her neck. And she needs to change clothes."

"Bucky," Peggy said softly, "you need to sit up. Just for a minute. You can lie back down while they're looking at your back."

She nodded and let Peggy pull her up to a sitting position.

"Captain, please stand back," ordered Doc. She didn't ask Peggy, though, which was weird.

A couple nurses approached and fussed over Bucky's clothes. One held the shirt away from her side and the other fetched scissors, but Bucky kept her eyes squarely in front of her, staring again at nothing. Her fists opened and closed; her shoulders were stiff but her chest relaxed. She looked like a –

"Stop," ordered Steve.

– caged animal, terrified and wary and about to snap.

He sat himself back down on the bed behind Bucky and rubbed her arm. "Left shoulder," he said, and his best friend relaxed it for him to put his hand there.

Peggy took the scissors from the nurse and told Bucky, "Right side," before cutting the seam up to the arm hole. "Shoulder." The right shoulder.

She handed the scissors to her boyfriend and Steve repeated the same with the left shoulder, finally peeling the flimsy cloth off Bucky's soaked back and handing it off to a nurse. Next was the binder – just a band, a bit too tight around –

Bucky closed her hand – left hand, metal hand, not Zola's hand but her own – around the scissor blades. "It's a good binder."

"I'll take it to the tailor," Peggy supplied. "Have them attach hooks to the back. Could you put your arms up?"

She and Steve eased the band up Bucky's back, careful to avoid irritating the wounds and scars that seemed to grow more extensive every time he looked at them. Peggy took it, kissed Steve on the cheek and stood to leave.

"Blood comes out with – cold water and – and..."

"Cold water, soap and vigorous scrubbing. Yes, Bucky, I know. We both menstruate."

Steve gave his girlfriend – fiancée? – a hard look and she tapped at her watch. Condescension wasn't her cup of tea but anyone could be snippy when tired, and they'd had a sleepless night before the mission.

Bucky for her part held her mouth in an O-shape, the thought of menstruating, like so many other things, just occurring to her. Peggy softened her face, pat her on the shoulder and left.

"And her pants," said Doc X, after a weirdly long pause. "Help her up."

The pants were the same as Steve had seen in that last picture in the file, part of the uniform Zola came up with for his new weapon. Bucky's account of the last two days had her going straight from executing Hydra prisoners to tying the scientist up and stripping her back of his control mechanisms, and then back to the base to kill any threats to her freedom; her boots' rubber soles probably still had soil from the shallow graves she'd dug.

She liked the pants and the boots both, and a nurse set them aside to be cleaned. Steve hoped she wasn't attached to the uniform's jacket too.

Bucky wasn't wearing any underpants, something Steve hadn't expected; he looked away while the nurses helped her put on some, and sleeping shorts. Finally she laid back down on the bed, chest against the sheets, and watched a nurse insert the IV into a still-open hole in her wrist.

Doc X summoned a junior doctor with tiny hands to assist – "I always helped my mom with her clients' embroidery," he said, laughing to himself, "but she never let me nearby when they were over. Thank God for the Women's Revolution that I can tell people about it" – and shined a collection of bright lamps down on the patient to get a full view of the horror that was her back.

They decided to call for an electrician, who stared open-mouthed at the scene in front of her for a good five minutes before sitting down next to Doc. Lieutenant Kotani's pen who'd been to Auschwitz fared better, since he'd already seen pictures, but even he barely looked up from Zola's file the whole time.

They figured it out eventually: deliver electric current to the exposed metal, wait three to five seconds for Bucky to stop muffling her cries, and ease the wire out of her spine before it clamped back down on her nerve.

Steve rubbed Bucky's flesh hand through the whole thing and held her gaze as often as possible.

All the meanwhile the junior doctor explored her neck. Zola had dug out anything around the top of the spine that he deemed non-essential, leaving a hole with muscles, nerves and bones exposed. When Bucky removed the muzzle she'd simply pulled the fastener away from her skin and sawed away at the wires, so the doc separated and capped any exposed metal to be removed by Doc X. Finished, he stitched up Bucky's cheeks – "They'll leave scars." – and stood to supervise the nurses who were cleaning the wounds on her back.

Peggy returned briefly to inform them that Zola had been recovered, in surgery as they spoke, and Morita was a few doors down in the infirmary awaiting a visit from his CO.

Bucky fell asleep while the doctors stitched up her back.

* * *

"You son of a bitch, where is she?"

For all that he looked ready to fight a bulldog, Jim was still too weak to resist being pushed back down on his bed. "She's sleeping. How're you doing?"

"I'm peachy, Steve, doin' swell. No one'll tell me where she is, said it was on your orders."

 _Yeah, and I already told you, don't bother her._

Steve pulled up a chair and sat opposite his formerly-MIA communications officer – they all ignored that he was only a private – in a hospital room three doors down from Bucky.

Funny, the rooms looked bigger when they weren't filled with a dozen nurses and orderlies.

"She's here, right? You brought her back, you – that's what the crowd outside was about. Had to be."

"She's fine, Jim. Don't make me get a nurse to find out how you're really doing."

Steve could already tell the answer to that would be "not great". He could see Jim's ribs through his shirt and his normally-round face stuck out at angles straight out of Steve's own childhood.

His pen sighed and leaned against the wall. "I spent a month in a Hydra base doing menial labor with a shock collar 'round my neck. I'm _great_."

"How's your arm?"

"Still healing. Didn't help I barely got one meal a day but at least they let me keep the splint on. Pure luck I survived, or maybe I was already used to it from the last time around." He sniffed, wiped at his nose with his good hand. "Gabby told you what happened?"

"She fixed up your arm and left you in position to check on Frenchie. No one heard anything more from you over the comms. Sam went to check on you, found evidence of a fight."

"Is she – is she still here? I remember she was due for a discharge."

"Yeah, she's back home. Took the GI bill, making a list of places to apply to."

"She kept talking 'bout Georgia Tech. Have they desegregated yet?"

"Women, yes. Blacks and Hispanics, no. But she said she'd force the issue if she had to. A college turning down a Commando... that might be enough to integrate it. Anyway. Did you get sick at all?"

"Nah. You must've found our cells, they were in the basement. Warmest place in the building. They fed us leftovers and the same water they gave their pens. Not enough of either, but nothing rotten or diseased."

"About the base –"

"I didn't know it was Bucky. I swear, Steve, I saw her every day getting dragged around but that damned mask – if I'd known I woulda gotten her out, or at least told Peg when –"

He fell silent at Steve's hand.

"Who were the other prisoners?"

"GIs, mostly. They died in an escape attempt. I couldn't go with my busted arm. I figured you'd get to the base eventually."

"I can't ask you about... the executions. Not until you've been debriefed. Apparently I'm biased," he deadpanned.

Morita laughed but it turned into a frown quickly. "Yeah. I'd appreciate it if I got a few days to recuperate. I don't want to think about that right now."

He'd been reading a book, a dime novel someone must've pulled from his box of things. Steve caught the words "a Martha Van Hess novel" in the subtitle and he'd refused to shut up about those books for weeks before he was taken prisoner.

Jim and Dugan – those two were addicted to their books. Steve had only ever read fiction when he was sick, often enough that he got roped into their literature debates sometimes.

"When can I see Bucky?"

"I dunno, Jim. She's sleep-deprived and her memory's a mess. She didn't even know we were American 'till I told her on the plane."

"Oh." He wilted. "That bad?"

"Zola played with her brain for ten months. Yeah, it's pretty bad."

"How long's it gonna take for her to get everything back?"

Well, at least he'd asked instead of assumed it.

Phillips had put Doc X, the on-base psychologist, Howard Stark – whenever he got back from the US – and a Catholic chaplain together to read through Zola's notes and assess just how bad Sergeant Barnes' condition was. Their first meeting was in the morning but the psychologist already pulled Steve aside to tell him that he didn't think she'd ever recover all of her memories.

"We don't know if that'll even happen."

"But she knows that she's – she knows who she is, right?"

"Yeah. Just fuzzy on the rest." Steve stood. "I'll tell Phillips to delay the debrief. But the longer it takes..."

"The longer I wait to see Bucky. I get it. Gonna get some Zs?"

"Yeah."

Jim fixed him a critical look. With Bucky gone the other Commandoes had taken over Steve-minding duties, although Peggy kept him grounded most of the time. "Actually get some sleep, okay?"

"You were just a POW," Steve muttered. "Don't go parenting me now."

"Old habits. Well, new habit. G'night, Steve."

* * *

Doc pulled out pen and clipboard, rustled through her forms and said, "We'll start with the basic questions. As they become more personal I might ask Captain Rogers to leave."

"Why?"

"Some of these questions are... intimate."

"And?" Bucky looked between Doc X and Steve, openly confused.

Before all of this she'd understood why their friendship was looked upon with criticism and disbelief. "They _have_ to be sleeping together," classmates – neighbors, family, coworkers – said. "There's no other way she'd trust him so much."

Even after the Women's Revolution – no, that had made things worse. Three whole years of displays of the power women had in society, and the view men had of them morphed from harmless to dangerous. The gender divide shifted from economic to purely social and psychological: women had to stick together and assert their rights; men had no freedom to their secrets and trust anymore.

Society only began to mend itself during the war, and the Commandoes were on the front lines in that fight too: men and women fighting together, trusting each other completely. The military threw open their doors to anyone who could fight; grandmothers became drill sergeants, co-eds air force pilots. If your husband was too old, disabled or had a nice job then you left him to watch the kids and served your country on the front lines.

Steve hoped to God no one was relapsing back into the Depression-era mistrust.

"She's having memory problems," Steve told Doc. "If she can't remember, I probably will."

 _The two best soldiers in the US Army are also best friends, c'mon X, they used this in the propaganda reels. Don't make me explain to her why everyone shitted on our relationship._

Bucky looked up now, at Steve, and opened her mouth. The words didn't come but the doubt in her eyes was enough. "It's fine," he said to her, and repeated it for Doc X's benefit: "It's fine."

To the side the junior doctor – "Call me Teddy" – picked up his scissors and pulled another stitch out of Bucky's cheek. She didn't even wince.

Doc nodded slowly, remembering maybe that Steve had seen his best friend naked the day before last and barely blinked, and said, "Let's start with some general questions. You grew up in New York City?"

Bucky nodded slightly.

"Any siblings?"

She frowned, then: "Five?"

"Three," Steve corrected. "The other two died as babies. All younger."

"Ever had whooping cough?"

Non-verbal no in response. Doc Teddy moved to the other side of the bed.

"Measles?"

She paused and Steve filled in again: "No. She already answered all these questions when she enlisted."

"Didn't enlist," muttered Bucky.

Steve opened his mouth to tell her, y _es you did, you went down to the recruitment office and the man at the door laughed and told you to go home, little girl, your patriotic duty's making guns for the fighting boys, but the sergeant standing nearby slapped him 'round the head and said that the army was for everyone who was willing and able and ever since '31 and the TRE act that meant women as –_

He wanted to remind Bucky what she'd forgotten, but Peggy filled the space up with her own words: "Her service number begins with a three."

There went the world, shifting and breaking again.

Well, shit.

"You knew?"

"I didn't discover it until after she –" _After she died._ "I thought it was just as well you didn't know."

Damn the women he loved, keeping secrets from him.

"She answered all this when she reported for duty," he told Doc X.

Peggy cut in again: "Zola's notes said he exposed her to a similar serum as Captain Rogers'. If her immune system was affected like his was then she wouldn't become ill. And any damage from a past illness would be repaired."

Like how Bucky measured at 5'4" going into the army and the medical exam Doc X just finished put her height at 5'7". All of her grandparents had been tall; she'd grown less than her sibs during adolescence, probably because she'd eaten less too.

Steve knew all of his best friend's stretch marks – they were on her outer legs and waist, places left exposed when she wore swimsuits. Before they'd put the tube into her stomach – the problem, they discovered, was with her gag reflex and not digestion – he'd done a quick look-over and found new ones on her lower legs and back.

There was the answer to Erskine's confusion about which of the two parts of his therapy – miracle serum or vita-rays – had caused Steve's growth spurt. Undoubtedly Zola's notes would reveal why his subject didn't die without vita-ray exposure.

"I'll locate her personnel file," added Peggy, and left her chair in the corner of the room.

Doc sighed and clicked her pen on the clipboard. "At what age did you your first menstruate?"

Bucky hesitated, looked up at Steve. "Fourteen," he told her.

"What was the date of your last period?"

Another one that Steve got to answer: "July of forty-four."

"Okay, how –"

"A missed period usually means pregnancy. I'm her CO. It's something I'd need to know."

"And was she pregnant?"

"No," said Bucky. "Stress."

"She also wasn't eating enough," Steve added. "I eat four pen's worth of rations a day. She was getting two plus spare mess food."

Doc X scribbled something that read suspiciously like "malnutrition prior to captivity" on her clipboard. "Were you sexually active at the time?"

"Yeah."

"With?"

She grimaced. "I couldn't tell you their names even then."

"There were multiple partners?"

"Yeah."

"How many?"

Bucky glared, a first for her – at least in the past couple days. "Does it matter?"

"Does it matter" – code for _I didn't keep track_ or _I can't remember_ or _stop fucking talking about my sex life, lady_.

They'd already gone over everything she could remember of Zola's experiments and torture, with Phillips – Bucky didn't recognize him – and a secretary present. She denied any kind of sexual assault, laughing bitterly that the Hydra pens were perfect gentlemen, and explicitly said that if there was anything documented she didn't want to know.

Doc X backed off.

"Besides your arm, do you know what bones you broke when you fell from the train?"

* * *

 _End notes : Binders usually cover your whole torso and look a bit like tank tops, so you can assume that what's referred to in the story as a binder is really more of a sports bra. Parenteral nutrition (such as PPN) wasn't developed until the 1960s but this is an AU so I do what I want._


	4. Chapter 4

_(Depictions of memory loss .)_

* * *

Steve ended up staying the night in Bucky's room. The thirty straight hours of sleep she'd had the day before had apparently not been enough but she started dreaming again after ten months of nothing, which brought their own problems.

No sleep, no food and no break from the torture for ten months; no wonder she'd decided to cooperate, even if it was faked.

Bucky woke up twice screaming before 2200, and both times she fell to sobbing in a matter of seconds. Steve rocked her back to sleep the second time and he hadn't laid her back down on the mattress by 2245, when someone knocked on the door.

"Come in!"

Stark strolled inside. "Came back from New York soon as I heard."

"Who called you?"

"Who else?"

Peggy, then.

"She said Zola left a bunch of designs and tech I should look at. Didn't realize that included Sarge." He nodded at her left arm. "You looked inside it yet?"

"No. She gets upset whenever someone tries."

"Huh. How functional is it?"

"Acts just like a real arm. Same range of motion. She can sorta feel pressure too."

"Neat." Stark shifted his legs. "Looks like it'll be a bitch to get off but –"

"I don't think she wants it off."

"Well, yeah, Zola messed with her brain. Probably made her think she'd always had it."

"Maybe." _Maybe that's why she wanted to keep the clothes._ "But it's still up to her."

"I'd get it off sooner'n later." He shrugged. "Anyway. Brass is running the headline tomorrow."

Steve frowned. "They should notify her parents before doing that."

"They did. Called the New York army HQ. Her mom wouldn't let the pen leave her apartment without her. You know how m– _parents_ are."

"Yeah. Hers especially. Her mom was in the Brooklyn Mother's Association."

"I'll be on my best behavior. They talked her into waiting a few days for a commercial flight. 'Parently she was ready to take an air force transport."

"That's Missus Barnes all right. Thanks. I'll let you know when she's up for you to look at her arm. Hey – Jim's a couple rooms down. I talked to him yesterday. Docs are keeping him 'till he gains some more weight back. He'd be up for a visit."

Stark nodded – "Sure thing" – and left the room. Steve adjusted his best friend's position against him, making himself more comfortable on the bed. He could stay here all night but it'd be better if she laid –

"Why is she coming?"

Steve gave Bucky's back a few rubs. "You should be sleeping."

"You were talking. I'm gonna keep the arm. Why is she coming?"

"Because you're here."

Her voice cracked as she asked, "...And?"

This wasn't Bucky; she would've laughed at herself and said, "Damn right, I'm here." She demanded loyalty and attention from everyone she knew, and they gave it because she'd already given them hers. She knew everyone's secrets and strengths and weaknesses, but only Steve knew hers.

Well, he'd thought he did.

"And it's been ten months. She wants to see you."

"She can't wait?"

More code: "she can't wait" meant _I'm not ready_ or _why does she get to decide what time to come_ or _what if I didn't want to fucking see her, did anyone consider that_.

"She's your mom. Maybe you don't remember who you got your confidence from but I do."

Bucky made a sound of assent and Steve added, "She won't be coming for a few days. You have time. I can ask Phillips to stall her if you want."

No reply, which meant, "Thanks but I'll deal with it."

"So," she said with that slow, conversational tone that meant she wanted to talk about something – anything – else, "I don't know what I'm gonna do after I get out of here."

"The army'll give you a discharge. Honorable, maybe medical. And there's backpay – probably extra 'cuz you were a POW. Gabriel and Rebecca have probably moved out of your parents' house so there'll be plenty of space there. You could sign up with the SSR again, work out of an office. Or take the GI bill and go to college."

Bucky shook her head. "I meant when I leave the infirmary. 'Fore I go home."

"Oh. Peg can get you set up with base housing once you start going stir-crazy. They have plenty extra. God knows I should've stopped living in the barracks a while ago."

"I won't go stir-crazy. I like this bed too much."

"I know you, Buck. Give it a few days."

She made a noncommittal noise, paused and then said, "You can take my living room floor."

"What about the couch?"

"Peggy gets the couch." He hesitated and she added, "Better'n that, we can get one of those couches with the pull-out beds and I'll pretend I don't hear you two having sex at night."

Bucky pushed herself away from him and smiled – actually smiling. He hadn't realized how much he'd missed her grins until that moment, seeing one again.

"When did you get engaged? And why didn't you get her a real ring?"

 _Oh, we're interrogating now. I see._ "I didn't get her a ring, she did. I think she found it in the lost-and-found. She handed it to me over breakfast and I gave it back at dinner."

Her mouth grew wider, splitting her face; Steve could see her crooked teeth showing. "Of course. I told you she wouldn't wait around forever."

"I know you did. I finally started listening" – _after you died_ – " 'bout eight months ago."

"Took her dancing?"

"No, I copied you. Left a bouquet at her door with a note and paid a hotel clerk to give me their roof key for the night."

Bucky's expression grew soft. "You had a rooftop picnic."

"I brought a book 'cuz I didn't think she'd show." He'd been so engrossed, reading with the flashlight borrowed from his mission pack, that she walked right up to him and stood there for a good minute before finally clearing her throat.

" 'Course she would've, Steve. You bought her a fucking bouquet."

"Well it didn't hurt that it was VE day."

Her smile fell and she held a breath for a moment before letting it out. "Oh."

"What – what's – did they do –"

"No, I like your memory better. Keep going."

"Buck..."

She leaned her forehead against his chest. "That's the first time I went through the wipe machine. I heard the news on the radio after. God, it hurt."

Kotani had put her German-speaking pen on translation duty and he'd handed over individual entries as he finished them to a secretary to copy down. One of two entries from May 8th included the lines, "Our enemies have declared triumph. This is but a temporary setback, and with our new weapon we shall rise from the ashes again."

"I'm sorry, I should've known..."

Bucky shook her head, her mouth a resolute frown. "I fell two hundred feet, Steve. I don't remember it" – _oh_ – "but I know it happened. There's no way you could've known I'd survived."

"That's not what you thought two days ago."

"Yeah, but..." She sighed. "Two days ago I cut wires out of my spine and killed a shit ton of pens and I didn't care who they were gonna ambush, I just knew I was gonna be next. And memories started coming back too fast to deal with...

"But now I've got a nice bed and a full stomach" – she fingered the tube going into it – "and I'm gonna be best woman at my best friend's wedding. At least," she added, pulling herself back again with a mock-glare on her face, "I _better_ be."

"You are," Steve assured her. "We were planning it for next month but we can push it back. We haven't sent out the invitations yet."

"Better late than never. I'll help write addresses."

"You don't have to do that..."

"I need the practice. The serum makes us ambidextrous, right?"

She'd thought it was the best thing, before. One day Steve couldn't throw with either hand to save his life, the next he was pitching SSR baseball games switching between both. "Yeah."

"I noticed it did. For knives and shit. Anyway. I'm not blaming you for anything and you better not either."

"I still should've caught you."

"I'm gonna fucking punch you."

Steve smiled; that was Bucky. "Okay."

* * *

The headline in the New York Times the next morning read, "SGNT BARNES FOUND ALIVE IN E GERMANY, STOPS HYDRA AMBUSH, SAVES CAPN AMERICA".

Phillips had it framed and mounted on his wall; Stark used his copy to clean his soldering iron as he combed his way through the inner workings of the prosthetic arm.

Bucky glared at Stark the whole time he worked. Peggy, supervising in Steve's absence, gave him no pity for it. As she related, Howard deserved it because jokes about metal hands and blowjobs weren't that far off from Bucky's stories of the things boys in Brooklyn shouted at her – and somehow Stark, the center of all gossip on-base, never got the memo that Bucky was a lesbian.

* * *

For once, Steve was right and Bucky was wrong: she caught cabin fever in three days.

She started by jiggling her leg, tapping her fingers, twitching at motions in a way that wasn't at all flinching but rather an itch to _go do what they're doing_. Steve stuck a pencil in her left hand before the Official Interview on day three and she'd gotten up to a middle-school-level of drawing skills by the time the interviewer from the Pentagon walked in.

Said interviewer snapped an order twenty minutes into the session to sit still. Bucky held herself stone-frozen and answered in monotone until Peggy, who accompanied her into the interrogation room, fetched two bottles of Coca-Cola and popped one of the caps until Bucky relaxed.

She went straight from the interview to the bathroom; Frenchie switched off with Peggy to hold Bucky's hair back as she threw up. By the time they emerged it had been decided that she would visit the barber next.

Bucky walked into the mess hall – her hair looked like it had been cut a month ago instead of that afternoon, all disheveled and past the ears – and the GIs gave her a standing ovation. She hunched her shoulders, got into the line and refused every offer to take someone else's spot further up.

Yup. That was Bucky.

She tossed the tray down across from Steve at the table and eyed the food on it warily. They still hadn't taken out the feeding tube since her gag reflex still thought everything that touched it lethal, but that morning Doc X ordered her patient to start eating or else she'd keep that tube in forever.

The mess usually gave pens a choice between two meals, equally shit quality, but Steve had a choice of a plate of one and two of the other. Without any prompting the workers gave Bucky the same. It still wouldn't help her eat any of it, though.

"I'll trade your beans for my applesauce," said Monty, holding his bowl up.

Just like the good ol' days.

Bucky further exchange her rice – for applesauce – potatoes – applesauce – coffee – applesauce – and meat – heavy whipping cream, that was Stark's donation before he wandered off to play with more of Zola's inventions – and consolidated her gains into a large bowl Frenchie retrieved from the kitchens.

Dugan told her, "Uh-uh, I think that's too much applesauce."

"No such thing, Dum-Dum," Sam told him.

"Is this a New Yorker thing? – I've been meaning to ask."

Steve passed his best friend a larger spoon to mix the cream in. "Apples are. Cheapest thing around during the Depression, thanks to all the farms upstate. Let 'em stew and add some cheap cream and you've got –"

"The best thing on the planet," Bucky finished, her expression approaching a maniacal grin.

Laughs spread round the table.

Steve gave her hand a nudge. "Go easy on it, okay?"

"If my throat doesn't like this, it won't like anything."

She slowly put a spoonful in her mouth, held the food still for a –

"Put this on the list of things I didn't want to see," quipped Sam. "Barnes having an orgasm."

Bucky punched his shoulder – right hand, good – and he yelped. "Shut up. It's good. Why did everyone get applesauce 'stead of the canned fruit?" She looked around at the other tables. "Wait – didn't Peggy say they only did dessert on Sundays? It's a Tuesday."

"We... may have told the chefs that you loved applesauce," Frenchie admitted. "And Stark donated the fruit. It was not trouble."

Dugan: " _No_ trouble."

"Or 'not a problem'," added Sam.

Steve poked Bucky in the shoulder. "You gotta swallow it eventually."

She swallowed, rolling her eyes, and took a deep breath.

"So far, so good?"

A nod.

"Great." Steve looked around at his pens. "All good."

They visibly relaxed – hell, the whole mess hall relaxed – and Frenchie commented, " 'Apple' is such a stupid word. _Pomme_ – much better."

* * *

Steve looked up at Bucky and groaned, " _Titim gan éirí ort_."

She chuckled. " _You're_ the one who fell this time around."

"Yeah, yeah. Help me up?"

Bucky pulled him to his feet and let him lean against her to get his balance. Around them a few pens applauded, others jeered and most fell silent under Captain America's gaze.

"You depend too much on being stronger than everyone else," Bucky told him, "but I'm stronger than you. You gotta be faster. Dodge more. Stop taking blows, they build up."

In his periphery Frenchie nodded approvingly. She was the one who always started the bar fights – her and Dugan, except he always went down fighting and she'd have to pull them both out.

"Is this how you two were before the army?" asked Sam. "Beating each other up?"

"Yeah, like he could've taken me."

Steve told Sam, "She kept trying to teach me how to box. It never stuck," and Bucky frowned in that way that meant the memory was lost to her.

He could tell she was putting on a front to cover up the memory loss; he just wished she'd drop it when it was just the two of them.

"Though he _has_ remembered how to punch," she cut in. "Can't call it a total failure."

"Actually... that was Peggy. She made me punch a heavy bag for three straight hours 'till I got it right."

"When was that?"

"Pretty soon after we formed the Commandoes." _You were standing right next to Peggy, giving me tips and telling me not to quit because dammit if you were gonna let me go to the front lines without knowing how to punch right. Even if you'd be there next to me._ "I think you were sleeping with a pilot that night."

"Huh. Short, long fingernails, redhead?"

"Sounds right."

 _Honored guests, may I present to you: Steve Rogers, the biggest liar in the world!_

"Speak of the devil," said Sam, and they found Peggy standing off to the side. She motioned with her head to Steve: _come here_.

"All right." Steve clapped Bucky on her shoulder – right, not the one that took more weight than it should thanks to the prosthetic – and ducked out of the ring. "Gimme five."

"Yeah, sure."

He followed his girlfriend over to the gym wall but she kept walking, down the hallways towards the latrines. She stopped still in view of the ring, probably so that Steve could keep an eye on Bucky.

"We found the shallow grave," Peggy murmured. "Two of the bodies had dog tags."

 _Oh, God._ "Why didn't Jim tell us?"

"He was hoping we wouldn't find them. He worried Bucky would be treated differently for it. At least, that's what he told me when I asked."

"Who were they?"

"Both Marine pens, stationed out of West Berlin, serving as guards for a diplomat who escaped assassination two weeks ago. Obviously the perpetrators had been unprepared for their mission. Army investigators believed the Marines were paid to look the other way but Morita says they were tortured for everything they knew of the diplomat's routine. The damage to their bodies confirms his account."

"So what – Hydra thought the pens didn't know anything worth keeping 'em alive for?"

"Six days ago that same diplomat collapsed and died while she drank her morning coffee."

"Oh."

Peggy looked back at the ring, and Bucky and Monty wrestling. "They'll investigate."

"She already gave her statement."

"She _killed_ two of your own."

"She barely knew her own name!"

His girlfriend dragged him into a hallway. "That isn't how our militaries work and you know that," she hissed. "They've opened an inquiry. We will show them Zola's file. You _cannot_ think that they would actually court-martial her."

"Two GIs died!"

Peggy stared, then told him, "Stop playing both sides of the argument."

"I'm not, I'm just – trying to be realistic."

"Your role in this is as the stalwart leader who stands by his pens. I will be the put-upon fiancée who is annoyed that her beloved keeps putting off the wedding. Who is perhaps a bit jealous of the bond he shares with his sergeant, and doubts her claim that she was coerced into executing fellow soldiers."

"Understood, ma'am." Steve leaned down to kiss her. "You're not, though. Right? I hope not. I'm sorry I've been spending –"

Another kiss shut him up. "Heaven knows if my best friend came back from the dead heavily tortured, I would give them all the time I could. The last thing I could tolerate was an impatient fiancé. And if I needed a break" – a third kiss – "I would know who to go to" – again – "who wouldn't give me – watch the hair, darling, I just curled it."

Steve had never fully appreciated walls until he could push Peggy up against one. Asides from the comment – unnecessary, really; Steve was always careful with her hair, with all of her really – she responded enthusiastically. He felt her pulling him down and kissed her neck, ran his hand up her skirt. He liked it when she wore skirts.

Oh, God, he loved his best friend but right now it was a relief to hand her off to someone else and play hooky with the woman he wanted to marry.

Peggy groaned and hooked her leg around Steve's waist. The last time they'd had sex against a wall –

No, they weren't going that far. Maybe that night, but not at the moment.

– her thighs were sore for days after and she could barely sit down but for the bruises. They'd called a week's break from sex to force themselves to do something else.

Teaching Steve codebreaking was Peggy's idea of "something else", it turned out. His was showing her the ins and outs of lace stitching. "An unconventional couple," Phillips called them, and Steve had replied, "Everything's unconventional these days, sir."

Shit, he was getting hard. "We might have to take lunch off-base," he murmured in her ear. "If we want to keep going."

"How about an early dinner instead. I have a meeting with the military police in two hours."

"We can make it in less than two hours."

"Yes, but if you leave me like this I'll surely be very peeved by the time the police arrive."

He brushed her hair away and kissed her neck. "Still thinking strategically, huh?"

"Sorry to interrupt."

Steve pushed himself back from the wall and sighed. _Break's over._ "Yeah?"

Bucky swung her arms around her body, silhouetted against the bright lights in the training center. She opened her mouth, closed it again, wet her lips – stalling, unsure of the words she had planned to say.

Steve wondered when that would fade and old, confident Bucky came back in full force. It probably hadn't helped that he'd sighed.

"How long will the inquiry be?"

Of course she'd heard them; of course Steve had forgotten that her hearing was as good as his, now.

"Less than a week," Peggy told her. "You've been restricted to the base until everything is cleared. Your mother won't be allowed to visit until then."

Bucky nodded stiffly. "And if they don't clear me?"

"They told Hydra how to kill that ambassador. If they'd been recovered alive they would be court-martialed." Peggy sighed. "They didn't stop being soldiers just because they were captured. They were supposed to do their job and kept her safe but they didn't."

"Like I was supposed to do my job and not let Zola break me."

"You saved the lives of more than seventy American soldiers," Peggy countered, "and took down every Hydra pen in that base!"

"Sure." Bucky turned to go, adding, "But not before I killed _them_."


	5. Chapter 5

_References for the story are here: [bit] [.ly] /2akYSDd_

 _(Descriptions of torture.)_

* * *

"I just – I can't do this, I didn't want – oh God I killed them –"

"You didn't know, aight? There's no way you could've known. They had you by the – the neck," Dugan said, and rubbed Bucky's back. "They woulda hurt you if you didn't do it."

It was true, after all: Zola may not have been able to distinguish left from right-hand fingers but he was a doctor who could tell if a body part had been cut off before death or after. If Bucky had only killed the other two pens – Hydra traitors, caught with gold and guns before they could slip away – she would've come back with four fingers, been restrained and stuffed into the memory-wiping machine again, the escaped POWs found and executed anyway and Steve's team slaughtered.

"She could've spared all the prisoners," one of the military policeman countered when Steve explained the circumstances. "She had a gun, she could've gone back and killed Zola. Or escaped herself."

 _Do your fucking research._ "They gave her five bullets and there were a dozen pens at that cabin" – all dead of broken or slashed necks – "all armed to the teeth. And Zola could paralyze her at the press of a button. She didn't know where she was and she didn't have time to get her bearings when there were two hundred pens out looking for her. Not when they had cars and she was on foot."

"She could've stolen a vehicle."

"Where, from the base? With everyone on high alert 'cuz Captain America was about to come charging in? It was simpler to kill them all so they wouldn't follow, and then take a car."

The policeman hadn't bothered replying; instead he finished writing down what Steve had told him and then asked, "What was Sergeant Barnes' mental state when you found her?"

 _It was shitty, but at least she wasn't having an anxiety attack like she is now._

Steve replaced the damp handkerchief in his best friend's hands with a dry one and rubbed circles around her temples, which still bore the scars of drills into her skull.

"Why didn't I know – I shoulda known – I – how –"

Bucky heaved again but she hadn't had breakfast yet and they'd already taken out the feeding tube. The bucket at her feet held whatever had been left in her stomach from last night's dinner. Maybe if Peggy had stayed with her she wouldn't've gone into the interrogation room with clenched fists and come out pale and shaking.

But no – Peggy had a plan. It involved being openly hostile to Bucky whenever they encountered each other and a lot of fetching tea for the military cops. Peggy made no secret that she de-facto ran this division of the SSR but to the investigators she put on the mantle of a pre-Women's Revolution overburdened secretary.

He still didn't know if the plan was working, though she said it was. He hoped to God it was, because if the military police actually recommended a court-martial...

Steve rubbed Bucky's belly until the spasms eased, and he pressed her wet face into his chest. "It's not your fault. It's not your fault."

In the other side of Bucky, Dugan switched out with –

"You don't know what I – you weren't _there_ , you didn't –"

"Yeah, but I _was_ ," said Jim. He put his arm around Bucky's shoulders and Steve helped her sit upright.

Someone handed Bucky a canteen and Jim held it while she drank. They waited the few minutes in silence – save for her hiccups – until he spoke:

"Willa and Kate, they came in with their outer uniforms but they stripped 'em to make jackets for me and the other pens. The others tried to escape but my arm's still busted and I couldn't join 'em. After they got caught, Kate and I carried their bodies to the truck and Willa put 'em inside. It was a bum truck. Zola had it burned."

Bucky sobbed into her hands.

"Couple days later they dragged Willa off and we heard her screaming for two, three hours. They swapped her out with Kate at some point. I wasn't there, they had me mopping floors. But I came back that night and – Willa was missing half her teeth. Kate had a shock collar on, like mine, 'cept hers went off on some timer. Every time she tried to fall asleep it'd wake her up." Jim paused. "Peg told me they kept giving you amphetamines to keep you awake."

He rubbed Bucky's left arm some more and kissed her on her forehead. "It wasn't your fault. They wouldn't blame you for it."

"You only – it was just two weeks, you can't –"

"Sure, but we were stuck in that cell in Kreischberg together for half that time and you still told Steve I should be on his team. We're GIs, we know each other. They wouldn't'a blamed you."

She shook her head. "I shoulda done better, there had to be a way..."

"There wasn't, Buck. I was there. I saw what Zola did before he sent us out with you." _What? What did he –_ "I know how many guns were on you. I saw you take that transmitter out of the compass so they wouldn't hear me running. You let me take a pair of the pen's shoes before you buried 'em."

"They had _dog tags_."

"In their pockets 'cuz they didn't want some Hydra asshats grabbing at 'em. I did the same." He squeezed her hand – left, metal – hard. "You didn't know 'em. You didn't recognize 'em. It wasn't a choice between two dead GIs and none, it was three or two. And I'm still alive, Buck. You took the better option. That's what I told the cops who asked me."

Bucky sniffed, breathed in and out and flattened her right hand on her stomach. "You talked to them?"

"Yeah, this morning. Right after Doc discharged me." He paused. "They laid it on me for not telling 'em about Kate 'n Willa."

"I'm sorry, I'm _so sorry_ –"

"Shh. It's okay."

Slowly Bucky calmed down, taking handkerchiefs and sips of water until her face cleared and the hiccups stopped. Steve knew from experience that the redness around her eyes would fade before dinner.

She made Jim go eat lunch because his stomach growled, but he insisted she come with and it turned into a group trip to the mess. Steve claimed one of the private dining rooms for officers and brought the food over rather than make his two new – old – pens wait in line.

Jim told jokes no one understood because of the food in his mouth; Bucky poked her plate more than ate from it.

"They've finished the interviews," reported Peggy when she entered with her own food. Somehow she cared even less than Steve that it was shit quality. "I asked them to hurry with their decision so that I wouldn't have to delay the wedding _again_."

"They seen the site yet?" asked Dugan.

"I took them there myself, two days ago."

Peggy sat down opposite Steve and put her arm around Bucky. "How are you doing?"

"Thought we weren't supposed to be friendly," Bucky muttered.

"No one can see us in here. I heard the police were hard on you this morning."

Bucky stuffed mashed potatoes into her mouth.

"They don't believe they'll have to question you again."

A nod.

"I found you housing. An apartment, rather small. One bedroom, large bed."

"How many couches?"

Peggy hesitated and Steve cut in: "They usually come with one, right?"

"...Yes."

"You can have it," Bucky said, stabbing at her green beans.

"The couch?"

"The apartment."

"And where will you sleep?"

Steve told his girlfriend, "On the couch," and gave her a look. They'd already talked about keeping Bucky close until she could go home to her family. No way was he buying a sofa bed and shipping it state-side after the discharge, though – he was saving his money and he wouldn't let Bucky waste hers when the couch was just as good.

"What about me?" asked Jim. "I'm not gonna sleep in the barracks."

"San Francisco," Bucky suggested, and everyone looked confused at her. "What?"

"Why San Francisco?"

" 'Cuz that's where you're" – Bucky wilted – "not from, obviously."

Jim patted her hand. "Fresno, ace. Close enough."

* * *

Mrs. Barnes stood when Steve showed up outside Colonel Phillips' office and told him, "You're still not as tall as your father."

"What can I say, my mom was short." He held out his hand for her to shake but she moved past it and hugged him.

She hadn't done that since he was fourteen. Bucky had been forced to explain to her parents, "Steve thinks that adults have to shake hands, and apparently we're all adults when we turn fifteen," and they'd accepted it and taken his hand whenever offered. Even at his mom's memorial mass.

How much of himself had he tied up in proving that he was grown up, didn't need help, shouldn't be viewed as a helpless child just because he was short and frail? – and how fast had that slipped away after the serum?

How much of it was still around?

"Oh, it's good to see you," said Bucky's mom. She let go and backed up, looked over him fully. "You should've taken leave and visited us. Why didn't you?"

 _Because I got your daughter killed._

"I think it's kinda obvious why."

She pursed her lips. "You could have at least called."

"I know, I should've, I just – God, I still gotta tell you about the train –"

"No need to do that. Agent Carter explained it for me."

"Yeah, but –" He took a breath. "You deserved answers _then_."

Mrs. Barnes reached out to rub Steve's arm. "Peggy called us a week after the train. Two days after they recovered you from that plane. She said you went on a suicide mission because of what happened to Bucky and she didn't think you could handle talking to us. But she and – Private Jones, I remember – they answered every question we had."

"Oh."

"There's a rumor in the newspaper that you and her – Carter – you're seeing each other."

"We're engaged, yeah."

"Of course, I'll need to talk with her before the wedding."

Something in her voice made Steve think of his own mother, long dead and buried. Grief stabbed his heart – she would've loved Peggy. Loud and outspoken were her types.

The first thing he was doing when he got back to New York was buying a real gravestone for her and his father, both. They'd probably prefer to share the marker.

"What? – I mean, 'course, but..."

"To approve of her."

Steve's mind shorted. "You're – you're not –"

He'd thought they hated him. Peggy may have been right that Bucky made her decision but civilians didn't understand that, family didn't, and Steve was her CO and her best friend and it was his responsibility to keep –

Maureen Barnes gave him a sharp look. "I know I'm not your mother but you're the closest thing possible to a third son. Sarah's gone so it's my responsibility not to let you tie yourself up with someone who'll make you miserable."

 _You're not angry with me._

"Oh. Okay, she's – uh, she's with Bucky right now so you can probably –"

No, that wouldn't work. Bucky would demand her mother's full attention for the first time since she'd turned two and Gabriel was born.

Steve floundered and his best friend's mother only made it worse by waiting patiently for him to get his words together.

"Uh. Did they – how did they tell you when we found her?"

Mrs. Barnes snorted a laugh. "The pen who came by, when I answered the door, he pointed at the BMA patch I'd sewed next to Bucky's star on the service flag and told me I was gonna take it down. I almost kicked him out of the apartment. Then he said, no, he meant the star, and, 'This is not going the way I thought it would'."

Steve relaxed against the wall and chuckled; Bucky's mom was scarier than his own when angry.

The BMA patches were a new thing and it still angered some old-time military men. "We've been putting them next to the stars for women," Mrs. Barnes had explained in a letter. "The other mother's associations do the same. I think it's national now. We want to make sure people know our daughters deserve the same rights as their brothers."

"We deserve equal rights" was the Brooklyn Mother's Association motto, adopted at the same time they formed in 1926. Prohibition hit New York City hard and the gang crime in Brooklyn was only made worse by the coppers ignoring complaints, even jailing women who took it upon themselves to police their own streets. The BMA started as a group to protest police indifference; it ended up being the flagship organization for the Women's Revolution.

Bucky's mom had stayed on the sidelines until one day in 1928 the principal sent her daughter home from school at lunch, with a note informing Mr. Barnes that Marjorie had been expelled for fighting. She demanded an explanation and Bucky told her, "It was five against one and the kid, he was so little they would've broke him like a twig."

The kid, of course, was Steve, and the principal refused to discipline the other kids because "boys will be boys".

Maureen Barnes got her BMA membership an hour after enrolling Bucky in Catholic school; Sarah Rogers followed suit two days later. Neither were the stereotypical big strong matriarch but they worked just as hard and attended as many meetings as they could, even with Steve and his mom sick every winter.

It was worth it, though: the wage hike Mrs. Rogers got at her nursing job from the '31 Total Rights Equality Act paid for the medicine they needed to survive the '33 flu.

"Poor boy looked so eager to give someone good news for once," Maureen Barnes continued. "He'd spent the last week making notifications in the neighborhood, didn't know how to tell someone their kid was alive. He said he was a salesperson before the war so he thought that would work."

"But he cut the funny business out, right?"

"Yep. I told him to talk straight and he said, all in this big rush, 'Captain Rogers recovered your daughter Marjorie from a rogue Nazi camp in Germany three days ago'. I asked, 'Dead or alive?' and he told me, 'Well, ma'am, they found her killing a bunch of Nazi pens, so, uh, alive'."

Steve nodded. "The official count's two-hundred and eighteen, not including a couple deserters who she... also killed."

Mrs. Barnes frowned. "She killed the deserters? Why? Does it have anything to do with the investigation?"

"What? How'd you know about –"

"The SSR agents who made me wait this long to come, they told me I couldn't see her until they finished the investigation – they said something about a court-martial. What's going on? – is she detained, are they really –"

"No, no. They cleared her last week. She's been staying with Peg and me."

"What was there to investigate? She was – the papers said she'd been tortured. Anything she did would've been – did she _do_ something?"

"I can't say anything about it. I'm sorry. But it's over and they're discharging her in a week, so you shouldn't worry."

For once, Bucky's mom let her hound nose off a scent. "And there's no lasting damage? Other than her arm?"

"So far, no. 'Sides from..."

Bucky had woken up blind after falling from the train; her optic nerves, Zola discovered, had been torn on impact. He repaired the damage, and then for good measure inserted a mechanism that severed the nerves again when he so desired. As a way to stop her from escaping, she'd explained.

If she left her eyes closed for too long, she'd find herself blind for a few seconds when she opened them again. Doc X said it was lingering damage to the optic nerves that would sort itself out over time, while the psychologist thought Bucky was unconsciously reliving her captivity. Whatever the chaplain had told her, she wouldn't tell, only shoved him against a wall and told Steve she'd wait to get home and talk to Father McIntosh.

Father McIntosh died in 1942.

At least that time Steve had the gumption to tell her.

"She has mood swings. And nightmares. And... Zola, he – he used some strong drugs. Her memory is still a little mixed up."

"She told me to go back to Yonkers yesterday," said Stark behind them. "I told her to go back to Staten Island."

"We're from Brooklyn." She held out her hand. "Maureen Barnes."

"Howard Stark. And I'm from Manhattan."

"Ah. I understand. That doesn't sound too bad. Where's my daughter now?"

"Gym." He grinned. "Going through pens like they're shots o' whiskey."

Mrs. Barnes frowned and Steve had to explain, "We can't get drunk. Our metabolisms are too fast. She didn't – obviously she didn't tell me what Zola did in Kreischberg but every time we were back here we'd go to a bar and she'd drink vodka like it was water." He hesitated, and then muttered, "If I'd paid attention I would've noticed she was never more than tipsy."

"Well, you've always been one-track-minded."

"I guess. D'you want to go there now? – or I can go get her. The gym's not for everyone."

That got him a sharp look, and he almost backtracked, but she spoke before him: "Lead the way."

Steve led the way.

Bucky bolted out of the gym doors before Steve got the chance to open them; she only slowed not to plow into her mom because Steve threw an arm across her chest. He dropped it just as fast and Bucky still managed to knock Maureen off her feet.

Peggy appeared next to Steve – she and Bucky had been boxing, it looked like – and asked him, "What would you think of a summer wedding?"

"In the city? It would be hot. I'm not wearing a suit in that. Or my uniform."

"What about upstate?"

Steve shot her a look. "Not as hot, but my parish is in Brooklyn. Why?"

"If we get married in June we could honeymoon through the rest of the summer. Tour upstate and return to the city after the heat breaks."

"I thought we were coming back to Europe for the honeymoon."

Peggy wrinkled her nose, which was incredibly cute and made Steve want to kiss her. He did just that, a nice light touch, and his fiancée returned it for a quick moment.

"Europe is one shell crater after another. His Majesty's Army offered me a transfer a few months ago and they made it clear that if I didn't take it I wouldn't have a future in their armed forces."

That – but...

Steve knew Peggy, more than she thought he did. As much as she'd been raised for a future of serving King and Country, she'd always aimed herself towards the physical nature of fighting – to the point where she left her first fiancé almost at the altar in 1940 and joined the Special Operations Executive.

He didn't want her to be unhappy, let alone enough to leave _him_ at the altar too.

"Can you still take it?" Steve stuttered. "I mean, we don't have to live in the US, I don't –"

Peggy cut him off with a kiss. "I can't, and in any case I turned them down not a week after they made the offer."

"I don't want you to think that I – please don't give anything up for me. Not something this big."

"What would I be giving up? Only Michael still talks to me and he hasn't the guts to tell my parents he recommended me for the SOE." She kissed Steve again. "I've burned most all my bridges in England and from the stories I've heard your family is much easier to get along with than mine."

"I guess it's harder to put expectations on your kids when all you have is a rented apartment and a family bible."

Peggy nodded, a sad look in her eyes. It was a sore point that her upper-class-but-not-nobility family had such blatant double standards for her and her brother and, like so many parents, the Carters saw their daughter's combat role as a spat in their faces. Not that it wasn't – but as Peggy said, "they didn't have to take it so damn personally."

"I'm sorry," said Steve, because he didn't know what else to do.

"Don't worry about it," Peggy replied, and broke away from her fiancé to walk towards the Barnses with her hand out. On cue Bucky broke away from her mother.

"Maureen Barnes."

"Peggy Carter."

"In the flesh." Mrs. Barnes shot Steve a look that told him he'd chosen well. "Have you ever heard of tzuika?"

"No, I haven't. It sounds fascinating."

Bucky muffled a snort.

"Marjorie, you'll remember your manners."

"Ma..."

"I didn't raise you to be rude to your sister-in-law."

"She's not my sister-in-law."

Maureen slapped Bucky on the back of her head.

"What _is_ tzuika?" asked Peggy, stepping between mother and daughter. She held a firm hand out against Bucky's chest until Steve replaced it with his own and replied,

"You know any good drinking songs?"

"A few. I sing a very good 'To Anacreon in Heaven'."

"What's that?"

Peggy grinned, said, "You'll see," and hooked her arm into Mrs. Barnes'. "Let me give you a tour of the base. Where will you be staying?"

Steve put his back to them, facing Bucky, and muttered, "Let it go."

She growled.

"Let. It. Go."

Bucky wrenched out of Steve's grip but he lunged to restrain her. Across the hall Peggy glanced their way, blinked and steered Mrs. Barnes into Phillips' office.

"Buck. Think about why you're getting angry. You've never gotten mad when your mom did that before."

"No way I was _okay_ with her hitting me!"

Yeah, she had a point. "Before you got tortured for a year. Okay, I'll – y'know, Peggy's probably already explained it to her."

Bucky relaxed, finally, and Steve stepped clear of her. "You wanna go a few rounds?"

"Nah. I'm gonna go nap. Write some more invitations."

"All right." Steve caught his best friend's arm before she could walk away. "Hey – you gonna be okay?"

He met her gaze. She shook her head quickly and when she stilled her eyes were all of a sudden clear. "Yeah. Why don't we go to that place near base that Monty said had good stew? – Mom'll like that."

"Sure."

Steve joined Maureen Barnes in the office, kissed Peggy and told her, "Newman's Pub for dinner sound okay?"

"It sounds perfect."

* * *

"You should've bought the blue bowtie instead," said Bucky, and she retied Steve's tie for the fourth, useless time.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. No fashion sense."

"I could run and get one from Leibowitz," Rebecca Barnes suggested from where she perched on a table in the church's storage room. "His son isn't that observant. He might be there on a Saturday."

"You mean," replied Bucky, pulling a deep blue bowtie out of her dress's pocket and replacing it for the black one around her best friend's neck, "that he's waiting for the reception to start so he doesn't have to feel weird about sitting in a church."

"So who's converting, him or you?" Steve asked.

"You guys are assholes. I wish you'd both died in Europe, then I could've had sex with Max in peace."

"You're not having sex on my wedding day."

"No, but I _will_ have sex on your wedding _night_."

Rebecca and Bucky high-fived.

"W-minus-five," contributed Steve's cousin from upstate, who had flirted with Bucky during the trial reception until she laughed and asked for his cute girlfriend's name. "I still say the black tie is better."

Steve and Bucky told him together, "Shut up, Ian."

"Yeah, shut up, Ian!"

Ian announced he was going to the sanctuary to find his girlfriend, who was not – he said this directly to Bucky – a lesbian.

"Lucy could go both ways, thought!" she called after him.

Steve nudged his best friend. "Please don't break him and Lucy up. Not on my wedding day."

"Yeah," said Rebecca, "he doesn't have much family left," but Bucky scowled.

"He has us. Mom put Peg through the tzuika test and everything."

The clock said 0957 and Bucky looked to be getting into one of her moods – the same kind that kept getting her into bar fights until Steve figured out how to spot them and drag her to the gym so she'd take it out on him and not some poor drunk. "Okay. Let's go."

Steve had talked to the new parish priest only twice before he shipped out. He only knew him now because the moment Father Franklin found out they'd pushed the date back he made Steve and Peggy go through wedding counseling. Peggy was miffed, grousing that, "we've spent three years together on the war front. What kinds of conflict resolution does he think we haven't learned?"

But the priest made it a condition of holding the wedding in Steve's home parish and Peggy reluctantly folded. Franklin had already jumped through a few hoops to get the dispensation to marry an Anglican, after all.

They'd signed the court documents Friday morning but it hadn't kicked in yet. Maybe once he wore his ring and left for Niagara Falls Steve's nerves would settle.

Bucky squeezed her best friend's hand before she left to take her seat. Steve pinned his red-and-yellow boutonnière – they really were really going all out on the weird colors – and followed.

Peggy sat on the front pew in a deep blue dress, her cap a brilliant red. As she got closer Steve spotted the red flowers in her hair, hidden under the cap, and the red lace trim on her dress. He glanced around and realized that Michael's tie was red and Bucky's white dress had blue trim.

It was a theme. Everyone had let Steve panic that he'd look so silly and ruin the ceremony, all for a fucking theme.

He'd thought Bucky refused to let him wear white under his jacket because it looked bad on him or something. He protested that white would go better with Peggy's dress, wouldn't it? – but Michael Carter backed her up and the tailor used a special-ordered deep blue cloth for the vest. It had been Ian's job to order more for the bowtie but he requested black because apparently he wasn't in on the theme.

Well, as far as themes went, Peggy looked damn good.

No, wrong words. Amazing, mysterious, that moment in the morning when the sun spilled across the dark sky and they were there to watch it with their coffee and oatmeal on the roof of the Barnes' apartment building.

Steve sat. Michael, between his sister and soon-to-be brother-in-law, smirked and leaned to whisper, "Pity the priest wouldn't let me bring a camera. Your face was a masterpiece."

"Shush, you," Peggy told him, and reached over to hold Steve's hand.

Mrs. Barnes had taken over the invite list when Bucky blabbed about how few people from the neighborhood Steve thought to include. A quick glance around showed she hadn't invited _everyone_ – that would be for the post-ceremony block party – but most of the folks Steve had generally good relationships with sat in the pews.

Mrs. Green – pharmacist, Steve had swung by last week to pay off the old Rogers tab – pointed at Peggy and gave a double thumbs up. One of the Eduino siblings waved, a toddler on the hip of her older brother; Matteo Eduino's wife had joined up as a pilot the same week Steve signed his SSR papers and she died an ace with 23 kills on her belt. Sisi Corekci, the local halal butcher, looked him up and down with one raised eyebrow.

"A reading from the Psalms," said Bucky, standing at the lectern. She recited in Latin and repeated in English, as the Vatican had allowed when their post-war census revealed how many priests they'd lost to the Nazis.

A full forty minutes later Father Franklin finished his homily and called Peggy and Steve to the altar. "Margaret Carter and Steven Rogers," he said, "have you come here freely and without reservation to give yourselves to each other in marriage?"

"Yes," said Peggy.

Steve took her hands in his own, smiled and repeated the word back: "Yes."

* * *

 _End notes : The Special Operations Executive was mentioned in s2 of Agent Carter. And based on the Carter house shown in that same episode, and the fact that according to the wiki she went to a nice private school, I'm gonna say her family is well-off._

 _Țuică is Romanian plum moonshine. "To Anacreon in Heaven" is an old drinking song set to the same tune as the Star Spangled Banner._

 _That's a wrap on the story! Thank you for reading._


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